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The author doesn't say that you don't get the return on reading Moby Dick until you have paid the 16-hour price of reading it. What he actually says is subtly b
by gjm11 5y ago
The author doesn't say that you don't get the return on reading Moby Dick until you have paid the 16-hour price of reading it. What he actually says is subtly but importantly different:
"Only once the second price is being paid do you see any return on the first one."
So he agrees with you: you start getting the benefits as soon as the "second price" is being paid.
And I don't think it's quite right to say that the sixteen hours are the actual reward. They're the space in which some of the actual reward occurs, so to speak. You pay the price of using 16 hours of your time to read Moby-Dick. You get the reward of 16 enjoyably-spent hours, and also the reward of having your brain reshaped in whatever way reading Moby-Dick does for you -- deepening your ideas about friendship or obsession or sailing or whales, etc.
The 16 hours you have to spend are still a price, even though you enjoy spending those hours. (Some people enjoy spending money. They're still paying when they do.) The 16 hours you spend reading Moby-Dick are 16 hours you aren't spending reading The Brothers Karamazov or sleeping or doing lucrative consultancy or talking with your friends.
- cortesoft 5y agoThis makes sense to me, and I think you explain it better than the author. However, this is basically just the idea of opportunity costs, and pointing out that they apply to more than just the money spent, but also the time.
- infogulch 5y agoThere are 2 costs: 1. Cost in money to purchase, 2. Cost in time to use and manage. By paying these costs you gain a benefit (of any kind, monetary, pure enjoyment, etc). These are given. So far this is pretty easy to agree on, and could be stated in several ways including probably in terms of opportunity costs. The article's point is that there's a particular relationship between these costs and benefits. Namely, that the first cost only enables you to gain the benefit, but that you can't actually receive the benefit until you pay into the second, time cost. This is interesting because it's easy to forget or miscalculate that second cost, and because the second cost gates the benefit that means you may not be getting the full benefit from paying the first cost.
- gitowiec 5y agoExactly! The first commenter didn't catch that article at all...
- BEEdwards 5y agoBut that's not a price, I enjoy reading, that what I paid for. It is not something that costs me anything other than time, however that's not the "price" he's talking about. Otherwise "low price pleasures" wouldn't be a category, if you enjoy that time it's not marginally better than nothing.
- yojo 5y agoThe author is framing consumption as having two pools of currency: 1) money 2) time It costs money to get access to the good you are consuming, and hours to unlock the value. Whether or not you enjoyed reading Moby Dick, you have 16 less hours in the time bank. If you do enjoy it (I did not), you have paid 16 hours out of the time bank and reaped the reward of 16 hours of pleasurable reading. There are “cheaper” thrills. I am told you can spend 5 minutes on TickTock and receive some quick gratification. The up front cost is low. The cumulative payoff of spending 16 hours watching cat videos may not be as ultimately rewarding to you as plowing through some classic literature.
- zamfi 5y ago“Time” only makes sense as a currency in the opportunity cost sense. Those 16 hours will pass whether you’re reading Moby Dick or not. I don’t think it’s just time but also, as you allude to a bit, the extra effort, mental or physical.
- Nbox9 5y agoI think the “time is money” metaphor is very useful to thinking about time as a limited resource. The average person has about 630,000 hours in their life. Take out 210,000 for sleeping, a largely involuntary time sink. The time cost is truly the more expensive portion. This limited resource consideration is even more important to consider there are strict upper-limits to how much time someone will have, and no one has lived 1,000,000 hours.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
- shmerl 5y agoThe author defines "price" as using your time on something instead of using it on something else. Not sure it's a good definition of price. But yeah, many things require time and once you paid for something, often using isn't instant.
- rocqua 5y agoYou are paying the price in the sense of 'time is limited, and you are using some of this limited budget on this endeavor. The point is not that 'paying the price' is unpleasant. The point is that 'paying the price' reduces your budget of available hours. I think, in addition, there is an 'unpleasant' quality about needing concentration for reading that the author feels more than you do. But that unpleasantness is not the core of the piece. The limited budget is. Consider someone who reads 10 hours a week and buys 5 books a week. They will be buying books they will probably never read. They are paying the first price but never the second.
- taneq 5y agoIt’s not necessarily unpleasant but it does necessarily cost energy, I think. I love figuring out how a new piece of tech works but at the end of a long week when I’m worn out, I just can’t do it any more. If it didn’t have a cost then this wouldn’t be the case.